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Sarah Fox and Calvin Ford

GROSSE POINTE, MICH., JUNE 4 The bridal car? A 1965 Mustang.Credit
Fabrizio Costantini for The New York Times

IN July 2009, a few weeks after her fiancé called off their engagement, Sarah Fox sent word in an e-mail to her high school sweetheart, Calvin Ford.

It arrived as he was putting his golf clubs away at his parents’ vacation home in Sun Valley, Idaho. Once he had absorbed the news, “I knew I was going to marry her,” Mr. Ford recalled.

He told his mother, Cynthia Ford of Grosse Pointe Farms, Mich., about the broken engagement. She immediately replied, “Well, I’d better call Peter Henry,” the minister at Grosse Pointe Memorial Church, which the two families have long attended.

On June 4, Ms. Fox and Mr. Ford were married by the Rev. Dr. Henry at the church on Lake St. Clair, culminating a romance that their parents, siblings, guests and friends said they always knew was meant to be.

“I am so glad he came back into her life,” Mr. Ford’s new father-in-law, William Fox, also of Grosse Pointe Farms, said, mopping his brow in the 92-degree heat at the wedding reception. It was held at the Eleanor and Edsel Ford House, the English manor-style mansion built by Mr. Ford’s great-grandfather.

Mr. Ford is a great-great-grandson of Henry Ford, who founded the automobile company in 1903.

The bridegroom’s grandfather was Henry Ford II, who was Ford’s chairman and chief executive, and his father is Edsel B. Ford II, a member of the Ford board.

Ms. Fox, 28, and Mr. Ford, 27, met as toddlers in a play group at the church. Their relationship began to blossom in their teens, although they attended different schools, Mr. Ford a local private one and Ms. Fox a public high school.

Mr. Ford remembered a party at which they shared their first kiss on the front lawn of a friend’s home.

“We knew that it was there,” he said, “the start of the feelings and the chemistry.”

Ms. Fox said, “He was always ‘that guy.’ ”

Though the pair regularly united in the summer during college (she attended Princeton, while he was at the University of Virginia) they were never officially a couple, Mr. Ford said, and rarely in the same place.

After Princeton, Ms. Fox was off to Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore for a master’s degree, and then traveling overseas on missions for Operation Smile, an organization that treats children’s facial deformities. Her father, a commercial real estate developer and chief operating officer of the Brambleton Group, is chairman of the charity’s board.

After college, Mr. Ford, who was not interested in joining the family auto company, moved to New York and searched for his career niche.

The couple did not see each other for four years, until a 2008 party for Ms. Fox and her fiancé at the time. She and Mr. Ford exchanged a long, friendly hug. At that instant, Ms. Fox sensed there was still a connection between them, she remembered, but then quickly buried the thought.

The following year, however, after her fiancé broke their engagement, she admitted that she, too, had harbored doubts. But as for ending it, she noted, “I wouldn’t have had the guts to do it.”

Photo

The reception was in a mansion built by Edsel Ford, the groom's great-grandfather.Credit
Fabrizio Costantini for The New York Times

Afterward, however, she recalled how she “could not stop thinking of Calvin,” and decided to get in touch.

She sat in a chair on the porch of her parents’ home and typed, “You’ve been a light in my life,” adding, “You’re someone who cares about me for who I am.” Upon sending the e-mail, “I immediately felt a sense of relief,” she said.

Mr. Ford was so excited to get her message that he said he had to have a drink to settle his nerves.

He then tried phoning Ms. Fox, but she had gone to Ann Arbor to have dinner with her brother, Chris, who after the broken engagement had told her that what was “the worst day of your life is going to turn out to be the best day of your life for somebody else,” Ms. Fox recalled.

When she and Mr. Ford did finally connect, they talked for hours. And when she hung up the phone, Ms. Fox told her mother, Jane Fox, “I think I’m going to marry Calvin.”

In quick succession, the couple moved to Asheville, N.C., where Ms. Fox was offered a position by Moondance Adventures, which runs travel programs for teenagers, and began discussing marriage.

Ms. Fox hinted broadly to Mr. Ford that she wanted him to propose in a romantic setting; for Christmas he gave her two tickets to Paris.

They flew to France for Valentine’s Day 2010, and were driving to dinner along the Seine when Mr. Ford asked the driver to pull over so they could walk on the Pont des Arts, a pedestrian bridge.

With the Louvre on one side, the Eiffel Tower on the other, Mr. Ford got down on one knee. After Ms. Fox cried for five minutes, “she got out the yes,” Mr. Ford said.

Despite their relatively quick engagement, the couple, who wanted a summer wedding, decided to put it off until this year. In the interim, they relocated to Denver, where Ms. Fox is now a fund-raising officer for Operation Smile, and Mr. Ford is a lacrosse coach.

Returning home to be married, they gave their mothers, who have been friends for decades, special roles in the ceremony, which the women spent months planning.

Ms. Fox, who is blond and petite, wore a strapless, tiered Oscar de la Renta gown with a black ribbon sash. White gardenias, her grandmother’s favorite flower, decorated the church and her bouquet, and Ms. Fox wore one in her hair.

Mr. Ford, who has broad shoulders and sandy hair, was clad in a light gray tailcoat, with darker gray pants.

They were accompanied by a dozen bridesmaids in violet gowns, and 13 groomsmen in gray tailcoats. Two flower girls were in white with wreaths of flowers on their heads, much like those at the April wedding of Prince William and Catherine Middleton.

In the back of the church, Ms. Fox pulled her new husband close for another enthusiastic kiss. Then, once their formal photographs were complete, the pair climbed into a red 1965 Ford Mustang convertible and waved happily to photographers and a camera crew. Mr. Ford then gunned the engine, pulled into traffic on Lake Shore Drive and headed for the reception site, which sits on 87 wooded acres.

Guests sat at long tables under twinkling lights in an enormous white tent, where Peter Duchin and his orchestra played two songs before dinner began, finally shooing the crowd off to their meal.

In the days after their union, Mr. Ford admitted that during the ceremony he had been struck by last-minute jitters but that he took the advice of Ms. Fox’s brother and focused on his bride, and the inevitability of their marriage.